Pages from a Cold Island

But this is preposterous? A character is either
“
real
”
or
“
imaginary
”
? If you think that,
hypocrite
lecteur
, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it
…
fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from real reality. That is the basic definition of
Homo sapiens.

—John Fowles,
The French Lieutenant
’
s Woman

I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say … how your willful resolution to wrest the secret of life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public
canons of art, friends and shib
boleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism.

—A nineteen-year-old Joyce to Ibsen

NOTE TO THE READER

Although
Pages from a Cold Island
is a work of nonfiction, I have in some cases, to save them and me embarrassment, changed the names of real persons, their physical descriptions, in other i
nstances even the loca
tions where the action occurs. Where I
’
ve used the names of known persons, famous or otherwise, the incidents described are as I remember them.

1

At 6:30 on the morning of Monday, June 12, 1972, Edmund Wilson died of a coronary occlusion at his mother
’
s ancestral home—
“
The Old Stone House
”
—at Talcottville, Lewis County, upstate New York, an hour
’
s drive south from where I am putting down these words in my own mother
’
s house at Alexandria Bay, a Thousand Islands resort village on the St. Lawrence River. The latter was a body of water well known to Wilson. In his sixty-first year he remarked the extraordinariness of the continuity that allowed him to sit yet in his mother
’
s stone house amid the memorabilia of his boyhood, one of which was a stuffed bird of yellow cloth he had
as a child bought for his Grand
mother Kimball on a boat excursion down this lovely river.

Ironically, only moments before learning of his death in my hometown newspaper, the Watertown
Time
s
, I had been uneasily rereading
Memoirs of Hecate County
and was well into
“
The Princess with the Golden Hair,
”
that section once astonishingly held pornographic by the State of New York (the Court of Special Sessions had branded the book
“
lascivious and salacious
”
). I
’
d reached the point where narrator-Wilson (Wilson deplored the notion of this work being autobiographical but in his concluding section,
“
Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home,
”
he
’
d invited such specula
tion by having his narrator write,
“
In those days, what with revery and alcohol and art, I carried so much of dreaming into real life and so much of my real life into dreams—as I have sometimes done in telling these stories—that I was not always quite sure which was which
”
) learns that the object of his as yet thwarted passion,
“
princess
”
Imogen Loomis, wears—and unnecessaril
y, her condition being psychoso
matic—a harnessed back
brace. It was a symbol—attempt
ing to show the dependency of the privileged suburban witch he is portraying—I
’
d once again found too trite for a writer of Wilson
’
s sensitivity. The last lines I
’
d read were Imogen
’
s cloying,
“‘
I don
’
t want to see you for a while. It would make me uncomfortable to see you now that you know
’
”
—about the brace, that is—
“
‘
about me. You and Ralph and Edna Farber are the only ones who know.
’
”
And then from the narrator:
“
She put her purse under her arm and left.
”

At that moment I
’
d risen restlessly from my bed. Thinking I probably wouldn
’
t read on, I
’
d nevertheless laid the Ballantine paperback edition open and face down on the quilt at pages 186—187. I
’
d then gone downstairs, settled myself onto the black Naugahyde divan in the front room to await the evening
Time
s
, and without as yet having learned of his death found
myself edgy and sad. In a pref
atory note to the reader Wilson had written,
“
Hecate County is my favorite among my books. I never understood why people who interest themselves in my work never pay any attention to it.
”
At t
he same time he had had his nar
rator interrupting his courtship of Imogen—when in
dis
may I
’
d laid the book down he
’
d been wooing Imogen for a year and had yet to seduce her—with parenthetical asides to the reader (
“
was I being a little maudlin?
”
) indicating that Wilson himself, perhaps unconsciously, sensed that there were parts of the book that weren
’
t working. He had had his narrator tell us things like
“
After dinner, I picked up a victoria at the Plaza and took her for a drive to the Park
”
(wooing indeed! Would I have to annotate the text for the kids with whom I was thinking reading it?
“
At the time of which Wilson is writing, the 1930s, and well into the early
‘
60s for that matter, it w
as not uncommon for male in pur
suit of female to make barbaric gestures such as plying her with flowers, taking her to dinner and the movies, and in general indicating to her that in his eyes she was riveted with what the antiquarians used to call
‘
esteem
’
”
).

Wilson
’
s portrait of his narrator
’
s other
“
love,
”
the Ukrainian waitress-dance-hall hostess. Anna Lenihan, a rather too obvious contrast to the wealthy Imogen, seems not to work at all. The na
rrator has been having an inter
mittent affair with Anna, and from her he has contracted a tenacious dose of the clap (no longer a disease of the under privileged, as I can personally verify from a recent one-night stand with a lass from what one used to call
“
a good family
”
). Although he does sense the absurdity of it, as does Anna, in her utter self-awareness of her inability to manage even her own life, not to mention governing nations, the narrator amusingly and touchingly tries to bring home to her the meaning of the recent Russian Revolution and her role as a member of the new elite, the Marxist proletarian who should be thinking about dislodging her American employers and ruling!

Far more annoying, he has Anna talking of her drunken and imprisoned Irish husband Dan thusly:
“‘
He looked terrible. He just stared at me at first, and didun say anything, like he was sore—then I talked to-um and told-um I still loved-um and everything, and after a while he calmed down. He thinks that everybody
’
s through with-um. He
’
s a bad egg, I know it—he
’
s just as bad as they come. I
’
m afraid of-um—I
’
m afraid he
’
ll cut me up— he said he wouldun kill me, because he doesn
’
t want to burn in the chair, but that he
’
d do something terrible to me.
’”

Still waiting for the newspaper, I thought,
“
No, I absolutely cannot read this with the kids. Absolutely not.
”
As much as I wanted to work into the course—what was it to be called?
“
Problems of Modern Fiction
”
?—my unbounded admiration for Wilson, Hecate County wouldn
’
t ring true for them.

“
Shit
.”
And I chuckled pensively.
“
These kids are having oral-genital sex twenty minutes after meeting. They
’
ll laugh my ass under the seminar table.
”

The Watertown
Time
s
arrived. As I always do, I turned it first to the back page carrying the lead local stories of the three counties—Jefferson, St. Lawrence and Lewis— served by the paper. The three-column obituary with two-column, four-inch deep artwork was displayed glaringly upper right, and I looked at both the headline and the fifteen-year-old photo a dozen times without their penetrating. Legends, myths, monuments—especially American ones—never die, and as was my habit I continued to skim for juicier tidbits, a driving-while-intoxicated, a barroom brawl or a dope bust (and both violence and drugs have come to upstate New York).

Having skipped to the interior of the paper, I found myself reading about an ex-pupil of mine who had been arrested for possession of unprescribed amphetamines. It was no surprise to find he
’
d taken to speed. In my seven years teaching in these nearby rural secondary schools he was one of the three kids I
’
d put my hands on. In front of the class he
’
d called me a cocksucker (we
’
d been reading Shakespeare and apparently his diseased mind had equated an appreciation for the Bard with a yearning to envelop in flamed penises with my oral cavity). It was a senior group, so it had nothing to do with their ears being too
“
delicate
”
for such obscenities, nor an overreaction on my part to what the hysterics who write for Ms. would call an assault on my sense of machismo; all that pap about the democratic dispensing of justice in our school system notwithstanding, I yet had twenty other kids in that room and refused un equivocally to let his sickness infiltrate and oppress those others. Very deliberately I
’
d seized a bunch of his sweat shirt at his chest cavity, yanked him from his chair, slammed the small of his back against the blackboard, and with the palm and the back of my hand had slapped him repeatedly across the cheeks. He
’
d wept, the tears running over the inflamed face. In truth, he wasn
’
t a bad kid, we
’
d got on famously after that; but his home life was abominable, an utter desecration.

I was remembering that day in all its brilliant and furious sadness, and actually thinking of calling J. and saying,
“
Look, old buddy, join the Navy, or the Marines, or Vista or Action, or drive a Mayflower moving van from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon—do anything so long as you get out of that pigsty you
’
re living in!
”
Then it hit me. Slowly I turned again to the back page, laid the paper flat out on the floor beneath me, placed my elbows on my thighs, rested my now hot cheeks in the cups of my already sweating palms, and read:
edmund wilson, author, critic
(redundant, of course, and Wilson would have used the simple
“
writer
”
)
expires
(Wilson would have said
“
dies
”
)
a at talcottville
.